Donate to the Castlemaine & Maldon Railway Preservation Society

The Castlemaine & Maldon Railway Preservation Society is a non-for-profit organisation.

All donations go towards ongoing maintenance and are a large source of funding for future projects. All donations are gratefully received.
Donations of $2 or more are tax deductible.

One of the challenging realities when maintaining a heritage railway is that everything needs maintenance – often the equipment, infrastructure, tools and rolling stock is old and generally in poor enough condition that it was retired from it’s use in a previous life – our whole railway is in that boat – even our recent re-railing efforts using the ‘new rail’ was generally with rail that is still nearly 100 years old, some of the really new stuff is only 50 years old!

This maintenance is astronomically costly, however we feel that this is a cost that is worth the hassle. We believe keeping our slice of Victoria and Australia’s transport and cultural heritage alive and being able to actively share that experience with everyone is worth fighting for.

We’ve had to develop a fairly realistic philosophy ‘preserve where possible and maintain sustainably and sympathetically where not’ .

In our department of the railway – infrastructure, our biggest asset is the track – 18kms of branch line standard track inherited in a fairly worn out state from the Victorian Railways, back in the 1980s. It’s been a long battle finding the resources to get it up to a suitable standard to run trains safely while juggling the realistic workloads for a volunteer organisation – we’re getting there and we have a very clear plan ahead, however it does all rely on finding enough money.

Running trains and railways right across the world has never been a profitable exercise – there are a few exceptions however we’re not one of them – we do a great job of running trains and covering most of our costs that way, but every time we run a train, it can cost upwards of $1000 in fuel, maintenance, wear and tear!

That leaves very little money for other things, like our aged infrastructure – and that’s where we’re imploring your assistance.

Please consider donating something – even something small to help keep us working and keep this slice of heritage alive. https://www.vgr.com.au/donate (link to the official VGR website where secure donations can be made)

Current Fundraising Needs

We have been very fortunate through the State Government, VicTrack, V/Line, Metro, Railway and Tramway Heritage Victoria (RTHV) and other similar Tourist and Heritage Railway Groups in Victoria to have had access to a large quantity of materials that were surplus to the State’s Requirements.

These items include level crossing equipment, track materials, rail, turnouts, point timbers and in our case the largest and by far the most crucial item has been Concrete Sleepers.

These sleepers have been made available free of charge, however as part of the arrangement, they have been taken to suitable location(s) around Melbourne at no cost, not all the way to us – most of the recipient railways are in the same position with this not just us. Once we include the cost of handling, transport and finally acquiring the correct fastenings for the sleepers, they’re costing us around $50 per sleeper.

We require 23,000 sleepers to change our running line from Timber to Concrete. When the sleepers began to arrive, we were given an ultimatum, – take them now or they’ll be gone forever. If we didn’t take them at this price, we were going to need to purchase new timber (around $100 each) or new concrete (around $200 each) to keep our trains running. – On the whole, the $50 per sleeper has proven to be a real bargain – allowing us to complete the work far quicker than we could have ever hoped to previously and greatly lower our cyclic maintenance costs.

– A few quick sums:

If we kept using wooden sleepers (assuming they don’t increase above $100ea). Typically in our climate we only get 20 years life from a timber sleeper – and to keep the track in a healthy state it is desirable to replace 1/4 of these every 5 years – or more practically this equates to 1,150 sleepers each year – or $115,000 per year in timber – over a 20 year cycle this is $2.3 million – which needs to then start all over again forever.

Alternatively making use of this offer – of $50 per sleepers to use concrete, we will be spending around $1.15 million dollars in total to acquire and fit out those sleepers. We’ve actually been able to greatly reduce that amount further by making use of 2nd hand and discount hardware when it’s been offered to us over the years – often involving manually turning over piles of scrap steel to rescue clips and biscuits! Realistically we expect in our environment we will have a service life of at least 50 years for each concrete sleeper minimum – but in reality some of them are already 50 years old and it is probably far more realistic to expect 100+ years.

It’s a bit of a no-brainer when the comparison is made.

We’re down to the final few thousand arriving at the railway (as of December 2024) to fill our needs to convert all of our running line to concrete sleepers and as of December 2024 we’ve already installed around 11,000 of these into the track – almost half!!!

We’ve been allocated enough to do everything on our running lines, and we’ve found some generous bridging finance to get them here while they’re on offer – however we will need to repay this money – around $500,000 has been spent from our small reserves so far and another $100,000 in loans will need repaying soon.

We also still need to purchase around $300,000 worth of fastenings to complete the installation of the last 12,000 sleepers and we’ve had to dig very very deeply into the railway’s finances to cover the costs so far.

For further information, please email civil@vgr.com.au

Donate to the Castlemaine & Maldon Railway Preservation Society

Share this: